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Cloudflare hit by leap second “software panic” snafu on New Year’s Day

  • January 3, 2017
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DNS proxy software freaks out, downing servers in early hours of 2017.

Kelly Fiveash - 3/1/2017
 
A leap second bug that affected some Cloudflare customers in the early hours of New Year's Day was caused by the company's DNS proxy software freaking out and switching to a negative value.
 In a neat and detailed post-mortem explaining the outage, Cloudflare's John Graham-Cumming said that its custom RRDNS software began to "panic" after "a number went negative when it should always have been, at worst, zero."
On New Year's Eve, just before Big Ben struck midnight, an extra second was added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to ensure that the time remains in sync with the Earth's somewhat irregular rotation.
 
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